One could be forgiven for extolling the visual poetry of Mella Jaarsma’s art, to the detriment of its conceptual potency. Even a cooking performance, designed for the street, and involving none of Jaarsma’s refined aesthetics and seductively tactile materials, arouses the senses. This piece, titled PribumiPribumi, was produced in 1998 and enlisted non-Indonesian participants to join a curb-side cooking performance in central Yogyakarta. Attracted sensorially by smell, passers-by who discovered sautéed frogs legs as street food, according to their religion, either shied away in revulsion, or greedily consumed the fried treat.
The following year, Jaarsma moved onto new formal terrain as she conceptualised Hi Inlander which, composed of mammal and reptile skins sewn into body-covering cloaks, enticed audiences with texture and performative display. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s Jaarsma deepened her research into materials and how these might be co-opted artistically. Lush aesthetics and vernacular components have remained constants of the artist’s oeuvre, an expressive strategy shared across the field of Southeast Asian art. Indeed, aesthetically appealing forms and textures, and vernacular modes have been perceived by regional practitioners as serving to captivate audiences through familiarity, and thus facilitating the unlocking of complex discourses.[1] But beyond such visual attributes, a specific conceptual thread runs through Jaarsma’s art. From the late-1990s her installations develop conversations on polarised aspects of Indonesian society in the way of PribumiPribumi. Referencing culture, religion and ethnicity obliquely or directly, deeply charged topics in Indonesia as elsewhere, Jaarsma constructs works characterised by their fostering of mobile perspectives. Engendered in the local, her pieces and performances distil the parochial to universally-salient questions revolving around belonging/non-belonging, private/public, hybridity/purity, and other social dichotomies spilling onto universally relevant, philosophical terrain. Jaarsma’s art takes no position, but via its handling of polarity, spurs audiences to consider their own location on issues, and to think about questions of responsibility, empowerment, and control. How do Jaarsma’s aesthetics function, in tandem with context, audience, and language, to create these conversations pertaining to position and choice? How does this work fit into Indonesian and Southeast Asian contemporary art?
Starting in the late-1990s, and examining selected pieces produced over nearly two decades, this essay unpacks the formal and semantic strategies deployed in Jaarsma’s art for mobilising viewers into exchange on urgent topics of contemporary existence. It shows that this work, nurtured in Indonesia’s specific cultural and political environment, and using local references, speaks to the contemporary condition beyond Yogyakarta.
Historical context and artistic forebears
Southeast Asian contemporary art, from its inception in the 1970s, has been concerned with plural consciousnesses, artistically articulated by allusions to simultaneous but alternate views of reality.[2] Regional history offers some rationale for this multi-focus, by way of Southeast Asian societies’ trade-related diasporic composition, and collaterally, the attendant normality of cultural and ethnic hybridity, whether in the inhabitants of Jakarta, Manila, Singapore, or Saigon.[3] Another explanation may be found in the postcolonial period’s disconnection between the rhetoric of national liberation, and the patchy realisation of citizen emancipatory aspirations. Contemporary Indonesia is home to especially ethnically and religiously diverse peoples, a legacy of the archipelago’s ancient maritime power. Emblematic of this willing absorption of populations and ideas was Islam’s implantation in pre-modern Indonesia predominantly through trade and technological and information transfer.[4] More currently, and also contributing to polyscopic views of reality, is Southeast Asians’ partial acceptance, sometimes rejection, and adaptation of aspects of twentieth century modernity, according to need, possibility, and desire.[5]
Early-on a clutch of Indonesian practitioners experimented with moving perspectives as part of a new language of art answering evolving social-cultural-political conditions. In the 1970s FX Harsono (b. 1949) and Jim Supangkat (b. 1948) were exploring such interplay in artworks today enshrined as early contemporary Southeast Asian practice. Supangkat’s Ken Dedes is a manifestation of dual vantage points, the latters’ intersection speaking of a tension familiar in Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and beyond, the opposition of modernity and tradition. The piece takes no position, and instead cues viewers’ response to the unknown, movement itself, an oscillation between curious welcome, and cautious apprehension. In this connection Ken Dedes attests to Indonesia’s 1970s crash-course introduction to Western modernity as Suharto consolidated his New Order, bankrolled by American interests using economic clout to further their cause during the Cold War. Aspects of modernity, as mentioned above touching some segments of the population more than other, spread haltingly, and in limited depth, across social strata and archipelago geographies over decades. Arguably, Indonesia’s still incomplete modernisation keeps nearly five decade-old Ken Dedes thematically relevant: in the installation, gritty 1970s urban modernity is incarnated by the salacious come-hither of a woman’s unzipped jeans VERSUS pre-modern Indonesian civilizational glory, incarnated by a cast-reproduction of a 15th century sculpture of the Majapahit queen Ken Dedes, an iconic image in Indonesia and legible beyond as dignified and antique. Yet I suggest the enduring significance of Ken Dedes resides less in its specific theme than in its versus, the polarity itself, the dialogue of contrasting images with their respective semantics, and how one might negotiate these. The work’s conceptual crux is positioning, the option of choice, one side, the other, or fluidity between. Likewise, another seminal installation of the same era, FX Harsono’s Apa yang Anda Lakukan jika Krupuk ini Adalah Pistol Beneran? of 1977, is about pivoting and perspective, the question “What would you do if these crackers were real pistols?” forcing a new vantage point on viewers summoned to think and then write their answers. These two pieces, and a few others of the period, inaugurate an innovative, conceptually-based Indonesian art that, with critical viewer reception as its core novelty, marked Southeast Asian art’s departure from mimetic forms that was then mostly painting.(fig 1, 2)
How does Mella Jaarsma’s art fit into this early Indonesian genealogy of contemporary idiom? In a brief but perceptive 1999 analysis, Julie Ewington pinpointed altering perspective as a feature of Jaarsma’s then-recent art.[6] Even though one could reasonably attribute this shifting gaze to Dutch-born, Yogyakarta-based Jaarsma’s multiple cultural attachments, by the late-1990s, when Jaarsma had been living in Indonesia for nearly two decades, her practice, mid-career by the time of her 1998 PribumiPribumi, was manifestly grounded in a local contemporary art forum.[7] If anything, one could argue that Jaarsma’s multi-cultural view provided her common ground with hybrid Indonesians.[8] Whatever its ties to her personal biography, Jaarsma’s two-decade body of work from the late-1990s onward reveals its development of investigations of the plural gaze, as she too, like Indonesia’s 1970s vanguard, is attuned to evolving social conditions. Her corpus today discloses different expressive approaches to the probing of polarity. Examining and comparing selected examples over two decades, starting with 1998 PribumiPribumi, which I see as a mature piece that had distilled early-career experiments, my study brings to light persistent traits of this methodology as it garners audience critical engagement in collective social concerns.
In the following sections I illuminate facets of PribumiPribumi persistent over decades, and that have resonance in Indonesian and Southeast Asian contemporary art. Having examined PribumiPribumi, I then show how later pieces from Jaarsma’s corpus retain and develop this performance’s mechanics and modes.
Modes and mechanics of PribumiPribumi’s contextual expansion: activated viewers,polarity creation & liminal spaces between, playful titling.
More than two decades after Harsono’s Apa yang Anda Lakukan jika….’s audience-involving take on state violence, in a different, but equally tense Indonesian political climate, Jaarsma’s PribumiPribumi performance proposed a neutral event that triggered contrasting audience reactions. While cooked frog repels Muslims, for whom it is haram (unclean), the same food entices non-Muslims, who in Yogya were likely Chinese, and for whom frog is a delicacy. Through its neutral public location, unscripted audience involvement, and word-play titling, PribumiPribumi creates polarity. On titling, “pribumi” is Bahasa-Indonesia for “son of the soil”, or “native”. Considering the piece’s establishment of a polar-opposite duality between an activity perceived as either reprehensibly unclean, or welcome, the use of “pribumi” for titling is ironic since in 1998 “pribumi” had loaded political-racial connotations relating to the 1998 racial violence that had targeted the Chinese Indonesian minority at the time of the toppling of the Suharto regime. Chinese-Indonesian traders wrote “pribumi”(indigenous) on their boarded shops, hoping to be spared looting and bodily violence.[9] Though Heri Dono, Harsono, and Arahmaiani’s 1990s installations don’t field descriptive or romantic titles, Jaarsma’s clever, allusive, and politically incisive use of language and titling for her works is particularly noteworthy. Via a non-descriptive, associative methodology involving audiences drawn-in by anodyne cooking, the piece underscores that rules, however entrenched, are man-made, and that culture and religious identity are constructed, and therefore changeable. In its utilisation of food, banal and essential, and its democratic street location, PribumiPribumi raises questions of individual choice versus group think. As the artistic merging of everyday life, embodied by the consumption of street food, and abstract ideas, PribumiPribumi produces a relatable critical conversation about religious edicts and how they can be used, or abused. More broadly, fried frog provides a metaphor for perceiving the “other” in the Indonesian context. Beyond Indonesia, PribumiPribumi queries the necessity of the inclusion/exclusion duality.(fig 3)
As well as addressing Indonesian ethnic tension, the performance is significant for its expressive language embedded in ordinary life that obliges audiences to see communitarian discord as part of a larger dialogue on the mobility of man-made rules and exclusions. This method has meant that PribumiPribumi has transcended its original contextual frame to remain relevant and “activating” elsewhere, as verified by responses elicited by the work when presented outside Indonesia, even via documentation and not live performance. In Singapore, where Muslims are the minority within the Chinese majority, the piece was effective, audiences perceiving it as questioning division, rather than about Chinese versus Muslim values or lifestyles.[10]
PribumiPribumi was produced as Indonesia transitioned into the Reformasi era, a period of political and social transformation, characterised by uncertainty and fragmentation as Suharto’s New Order, with its tight, Jakarta-centralised control, dissolved. While it may be tempting to ascribe PribumiPribumi’s expressive methodology to Reformasi, as discussed above, in its conceptual approach to collectively-experienced tensions, this 1998 performance is comparable to modes visible in 1970s works by some GSRB (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru or Indonesia Art Movement) members—FX Harsono’s previously mentioned participative Apa yang Anda Lakukan jika Krupuk of 1977 one example. In the wider Southeast Asian art setting, PribumiPribumi is also analogous to works that, if thematically linked to particular traumas or tensions, transcend the specificities of those traumas, ensuring lasting artistic relevance.[11]
Indeed, multiple examples of Southeast Asian contemporary art trained on collectively-shared social tensions entice ordinary audiences through creation of polarity obliging critical answer in the space between. These regional pieces also draw-in viewers through the word-play of their titles. Tang Da Wu’s 1989 Singapore street performance involving ordinary passers-by Life Boat is one example: born out of Tang’s empathy for Vietnamese boat people sequestered in refugee camps in the city-state in the late-1980s, three decades after its conceptualisation, the piece today fashions an aesthetically and conceptually relevant critical conversation on population movements and borders that should engross global audiences everywhere. Similarly, Vandy Rattana’s 2009 photographic series Khmer Rouge Trial, while ostensibly thematically centred on the Khmer Rouge genocide, isn’t a simplistic denunciation of trauma, but a complex work about history as a malleable commodity that used and abused, is open to reclaiming by all. The piece takes no position, and through associative means, familiar signifiers, and aesthetic devices, creates compelling exchanges with viewers who know little of Pol Pot and Cambodia’s truth and reconciliation initiatives. Jakkai Siributr’s 2017 Changing Room, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan’s Commonwealth-Project Another Country (2013–2019), Dinh Q. Le’s Damaged Gene (1998), and many more such regional pieces are examples of artworks thematically grounded in specific social disconnections and traumas, but that through expressive construction incorporating lived experience, conceptual association, aesthetics, and playful titling, propose polarities from which viewers create their own bridges and then extrapolate a universal question from the specific. PribumiPribumi, emerging from Indonesian racial politics, speaks to global audiences. Viewer effort is required, but this is true of all conceptual artworks that extend beyond form for its own sake. (figs 4, 5,)
Jaarsma’s expressive methodology in PribumiPribumi contrasts with that of FX Harsono’s Yogykarta (fig 6) performance Burned Victims, also 1998. Both pieces were inspired by a same incident, the abuses suffered by Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority at the hands of the majority at a time of turmoil triggered by the 1998 fall of the Suharto regime and the Asian Financial Crisis. But whereas Burned Victims re-enacted the massacre of Chinese Indonesians through Harsono torching wooden effigies representing the victims (exhibited today as a documentary video, sometimes accompanied by charred wooden remains standing-in for the performance relics), PribumiPribumi isn’t descriptive, didactic, or drama-infused. Instead, through titling and idea association, Jaarsma’s piece bridges two seemingly distant positions, interrogating that distance’s significance, and therefore its “construction”, which suggests its alterability.
After Pribumi Pribumi, works produced by Jaarsma over nearly two decades remain true to this approach. In the following section thematically-distinct installations and performances are deconstructed to determine how, using parochial polarities and tensions, Jaarsma deploys an artistic language that draws audiences into conversations opening onto universal questions. This discussion sheds light on how the artist’s corpus continues to be relevant in others times and places.
Diverse themes, working viewers, mobility, position in five artworks compared
Hi Inlander Hallo Native (1998-1999), and I Fry You (2000) are among Jaarsma’s earliest costume-based pieces.(fig 7) They comprise sets of animal-skincloaks that, performative in nature, are today shown photographically as body coverings, along with, in some cases, the material cloaks themselves. Jaarsma explains that she created the pieces with standard Indonesian mammals and reptiles with the goal of comparing the contrasting needs and expectations of various population groups. This relativising strategy is especially evident in the case of I Fry You whereby urban and rural populations are confronted obliquely via squirrel skins, since squirrels are perceived very differently by urbanites and rural Indonesians respectively: city people view squirrels as cute, whereas for farmers they are pests, to be destroyed. Through idea association and signs, PribumiPribumi, Hi Inlander, and I Fry You invite audiences to negotiate ideas of belonging and non-belonging. I Fry You, for its part, resonates broadly in developing Asia, and as in some industrialised societies where urban/rural tensions may remain pervasive.[12] In the Indonesian context, while urbanisation was not new two decades ago, as Indonesia’s Reformasi took hold after the fall of the Suharto government, the previous era’s urban/rural balance, and the primacy of centralised Jakartan power that was the rule under the New Order, were both disrupted as diverse provincial communities asserted their interests.
Hi Inlander and other body covering pieces, with only the wearer’s eyes visible, are legible beyond Indonesia. Appealing to the senses, they are simultaneously lush, exhibitionist clothing; or armor, protecting the wearer; or isolating barriers that inhibit the person inside. This ambiguity interrogates boundaries and intersections of private and public space, and, as with PribumiPribumi, spotlights choices determining inclusion or exclusion. The covering works’ form recalls the hijab, which, in the early 2000s provided an additional layer of meaning at a time of then-rising global communitarian and political tensions as Muslims were increasingly portrayed as violent extremists—a cliché exacerbated by the 9/11 terror incidents, but already existing before. In such a socio-political environment, the hijab can be seen as a loaded symbol of faith and devotion, or Islamic radicalism, or female repression, depending the viewer’s own local context and perspective. These early costume works, whether Hi Inlander or I Fry You, allow various meanings, placing the onus on audiences to negotiate them, and critically ponder polarisation itself, intolerance, and system exclusions.
While PribumiPribumi examines sectarian tensions through the eating or refusal of frog meat, the costume pieces are less culturally-specific in their grappling with perspective and position. Fashioned into burqa-type cloaks with only a slit providing the wearer a view out, or, the same small slit giving those outside a glimpse in, Hi Inlander Hallo Native and I Fry You distil the specificity of PribumiPribumi into a more abstract opposition between exclusion and inclusion. By utilising costumes to create boundaries separating in and out, Jaarsma compels viewers, metaphorically at least, to see how these dualities might be substituted for one another, and thus interrogate their very legitimacy. Body coverings perfectly convey the instability and inversibility between in and out, so recur in Jaarsma’s oeuvre from 1998 onwards.
The Follower (2002), another body covering, is effective in this way too, but rather than animal pelts, it is fashioned as a head-to-toe cloak made from machine-sewn badges vaunting Indonesians’ affiliations with various organisations, including political parties, social clubs, sports, music, religious groups, separatist movements, and others.(fig 8) Produced in the wake of the lethal October 2002 Bali nightclub bombings perpetrated by radical Islamists, with its upbeat, colourful aesthetic, and its playful appropriation of mass culture through the badges, the piece was designed to counter the international media’s labelling of Indonesia as an Islamic terrorist country. It did this by evidencing the diversity and moderation of Indonesian society, emblematised by the badges. But more than a simplistic repudiation of extremism, the work conjoins two seemingly exclusionary worlds: The Follower‘s outside face of embroidered patches, representing a plethora of innocuous and mainstream activities; on the reverse side of the badges, the hidden cavity inside The Follower. As with Hi Inlander, form complicates readings as The Follower suggests polarity through recalling the hijab that both protects and confines. Pushing The Follower‘s conceit further, Jaarsma’s formally similar series of 2011, The Post Modernist, may be displayed empty, with no one inside. In this case, what is the viewer’s position, inside or out? Must audiences determine their place between poles, or could they be fused? In its materialisation of life as a composite of innocuous and outward-looking interests—punk music, body building—and a body shroud that functions as restrainer or protection, The Follower, starting in the parochial world of Indonesian sectarian tensions, expands to engage audiences on far larger humanistic questions of ethical positioning.
Dirty Hands (2010) differs technologically and thematically from PribumiPribumi and Jaarsma’s costume pieces. Requiring directional light and semi-darkness to create shadow, the stylised chain-mail effigy of the human figure mandates indoor exhibition where light sources can be controlled.(fig 9) Dirty Hands is formally engaging where PribumiPribumi is utilitarian due to its melding with daily life. But Dirty Hands, like PribumiPribumi, relies on audience intervention to impart meaning. As significantly, while Dirty Hands isn’t a body covering or mask, like other Jaarsma art discussed in this essay, it brings into play viewer choice and critical self-positioning in relation to ethical perspectives, utilising polarity to drive the piece conceptually beyond its aesthetics.
Thematically, Dirty Hands revolves around history, not religion and custom. But it doesn’t tell history, and instead has viewers write it, through movement as they manipulate torches, projecting Dutch soldiers on one side, indigenous East Indies fighters on the other—Jaarsma uses representations of Banda Island warriors appropriated from seventeenth century Dutch engravings that depicted the Dutch East India Company’s brutal (VOC) conquest of the islands to gain spice trade monopoly. Viewers insert themselves physically and discursively between enemies, giving “victory” to one camp, or the other—or to no one at all. The war is conducted in as many ways as there are viewers, with each participants is simultaneously invader and defender. While the confrontation between the Dutch and the natives historically led to colonial occupation and decimation of the indigenous Bandanese, Jaarsma’s work permits viewers to determine a new outcome, and perhaps call a truce that would unite the fighting sides. Through the battle’s uncertain result, and viewers’ obligatory involvement and decision, Dirty Hands proposes audiences as both subjects, and makers of history. As in PribumiPribumi, Jaarsma’s aesthetic-conceptual method brings fluidity between polar opposites, victory and defeat indistinct. By instigating torch-jousting, Dirty Hands surreptitiously nurtures a non-factional way of looking at the world. Commissioned for a Singapore audience, not necessarily knowledgeable about Indonesia’s colonial history, Dirty Hands reveals artistic intention beyond local specificities, and engagement with broader philosophical parameters concerned with power hierarchies.[13]
Departing in medium from previous works, The Landscaper (2013) is a short video capturing a spinning male figure on a hilltop that brings into aesthetic and conceptual dialogue a dervish-esque dance, and the dancer’s unusual skirt. (fig 10) Sensuous in its imagery, scale, soundtrack, and videography, The Landscaper confronts two discourse-laden sets of signifiers: a Sufi-type dance, and Mooi Indie-style landscape paintings, which in miniature form, compose the dancer’s swirling skirt. By connecting two seemingly unrelated worlds, Jaarsma creates a space of discourse between where viewers determine their position. In one camp the ecstatically twirling figure, whose trance-like movement recalls the mystic Islam of syncretic Java, anathema in today’s religiously-conservative Indonesia; in the other, the dervish’s skirt, which not cloth, is instead a patchwork of tiny paintings in the Mooi Indie (Beautiful Indies) style favoured by Dutch colonial painters depicting Indonesian volcanoes and forests as idealised, romantic landscapes. The dervish can be understood as testing a purist conception of Islam, and conversely,recalling local populations’ open reception of ideas that have led to an historically hybrid and culturally and religiously tolerant Indonesia. The Mooi Indie skirt, for its part, speaks of other kinds of cultural hybridity, as Mooi Indie imagery, initially representing the Javanese landscape seen through the lens of the nineteenth century European salon style, was itself appropriated by some Indonesian painters, thus complexifying local rejection of Dutch cultural imperialism.
Formally compelling for its sensuality and iconographic eclecticism yielding an incongruous composite of visual and cultural totems—the competing aesthetic registers of the delirious, intense dancer, and the formulaically, repetitively patterned skirt—The Landscaper links and confronts distinct discourses of hybridity and cultural borrowing. It thus critically probes inter-cultural interdependence, the value of purity, and meanings and impacts of cultural colonialism as opposed to cultural borrowing. It illuminates and complicates the reality of shifting and super-imposed identities. Spawned in Yogyakarta at a time of growing religious division, when faith was increasingly being ambushed as a tool of power, The Landscaper also found resonance in Istanbul where religion is often used for political gain. While Turkish viewers were oblivious to the specificities of Mooi Indie, Jaarsma’s carefully crafted, dynamic conversation between sensual dancer and stiffly repeated iconographic cliché, ushered non-Indonesians into an exchange where they would take a thoughtful position.[14] The Landscaper’s formal structure differs from that of PribumiPribumi and other pieces discussed above, but discloses comparable strategies of audience engagement as viewers, through the senses, are drawn into an ongoing exchange between opposing but related positions on fundamental issues of identity and hybridity, and thus are compelled to weigh their own critical and perhaps evolving location within the discourse.
Language shift
Apart from its irresistible aesthetics, what does DogWalk of 2016 share, or not, with pieces examined to date, and what does it say about Jaarsma’s artistic evolution in relation to Indonesia’s shifting socio-political paradigms of the 2010s?
Commissioned for the 2016 Sydney Biennale, DogWalk was a costumed group performance in the formal vein of Nindityo Adipurnomo and Mella Jaarsma’s 2008 The Last Animist. But unlike The Last Animist, which called on ordinary members of an inclusive Netherlands community to join a public march, DogWalk appropriates the cat-walk fashion show genre to be watched, not joined. DogWalk therefore diverges significantly from Jaarsma’s community-reliant works, among which, emblematically, the participatory street performance PribumiPribumi that enlisted voluntary audiences who through food, were made to query, and potentially bridge, ethnic and religious divisions.
PribumiPribumi is formally amorphous, but conceptually tight, whereas scripted DogWalk is formally simple, but conceptually diffuse, marking a transition in Jaarsma’s oeuvre. How and why is this? DogWalk doesn’t mobilise viewers physically, but does it achieve this discursively, drawing them intocritical exchange on polarities?
Performative DogWalk (fig 11) is visually stylish, but referentially ambiguous in its straddling of fashion show reality, and parody. It embraces spectacle as its cow-hide and goat, lamb-skin clothed models parade in public space with live dogs, a cow, and fellow models led on leashes, a nod to fetish culture integral to global fashion’s visual vocabulary. Ersatz cow legs with hooves are attached to costumes, reinforcing the animal-human connection. Humorous and theatrical, DogWalk‘s leash-toting cortege offers overt commentary on power hierarchies, continuing a theme explored in Jaarsma’s 2015 The Pecking Order.
Outside its clear reference to control, what is DogWalk conveying, and to whom? According to the artist’s statement, DogWalk draws from Indonesian syncretic belief systems, global mass brand culture and fashion, and a recalling of rural life’s human-animal relationships and interdependencies. Asked about the piece’s non-Indonesia presentation, and what artistic means, if any, Jaarsma had adopted for conceptual translation of the work’s eclectic references, in a recent interview the artist confirmed that her awareness of the work’s Sydney audience had informed her expressive choices.[15] She explained that because Australian viewers were not necessarily conversant with Indonesia’s animal culture examined critically in the piece (including the dietary-religious significance of Halal goats, cows, and sheep, as opposed to Haram dog or pig), she had sought to link DogWalk‘s Indonesia reading to animal welfare, a key concern in Australia. The two sets of tensions would together form the piece’s critical pivot: dogs for Muslim Indonesians are unclean, whereas in Australia they are trusted friends sharing domestic space—a similar comparative relativism explored years before in I Fry You. DogWalk’s construction therefore accounts for a transnational reading not evident in PribumiPribumi, Hi Inlander, I Fry You, The Follower, Dirty Hands, and The Landscaper, most of which were produced for Indonesian audiences, though later exhibited overseas. Even I Fry You and Dirty Hands, commissioned for Australian and Singapore audiences respectively, don’t make concessions to translation. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Jaarsma, joining international exhibitions in the 1990s—she produced Hi Inlander for APT3, in 1999, for example—was not previously more deliberate regarding translation.
The more emphatic worlding of art, as articulated by the global biennale circuit’s opening to selected Asian artists, may explain this double perspective.[16] While Jaarsma had been conceptualising art for international audiences for decades, Sydney’s 2016 audience was truly global since, unlike a decade before, it could be reached virtually with tools such as Instagram. Indeed, DogWalk’s formal clarity as a slow-moving procession of beige-clad young models parading fellow models on red leashes, is photogenically striking on social media, although states Jaarsma, this didn’t consciously determine the performance’s visual attributes.[17]
On a conceptual level, what might explain DogWalk’s elusive character, the manifest tension of PribumiPribumi and other pieces now replaced with an elusive discomfort? I suggest that this change in Jaarsma’s language may be tied to Indonesia’s political-cultural evolution of the 2010s.
After 2010, when Indonesia’s Reformasi transition is often considered done, according to analysts the country experienced democratic regression as moderate Islam (the preserve of the Indonesian mainstream) ceded ground in the political forum.[18] Speaking generally, the social-political-religious-ethnic polarities of the Reformasi period, conventionally dated 1998-2010, had by 2016 given way to more opaque and uncertain ground. This is evidenced as countless competing and previously-repressed factions, unleashed in a more politically-socially fractured Indonesia, came to the fore to serve battling interests. DogWalk‘s seductive aesthetics, as with many of Jaarsma’s pieces, lead to discursive complexities, but here the topic is disarray, as the performance fields various and not always plainly-signaled critical tropes. DogWalk departs Jaarsma’s embedded dual consciousness, viewers now challenged to tease meanings from its multiple lines of enquiry.
For Indonesian audiences, Jaarsma’s allusive meaning attached to animals and morality may emerge more vividly from DogWalk than for non-Southeast Asians, unfamiliar with the anarchist good-evil animal-headed disruptor that is simultaneously welcomed and shunned. The latter, originating in the animist pantheon of Southeast Asia, is an animal-humanoid inhabiting regional mythologies that, for many Southeast Asians, retain currency. Yet whether in Indonesia or beyond, DogWalk‘s animal reference suggests ambivalent reception. Visually crisp but conceptually clouded DogWalk, produced as Indonesian political and social antagonisms were increasing, may also resonate with global audiences in a time of rising nationalism, intolerance, and return to a tribal politics supposed to have disappeared in the optimistic globalising turn-of-the-millennium era. DogWalk, distinct to Jaarsma’s previous practice, doesn’t embody tension within itself, but may disturb viewers into critical reaction.
DogWalk’s shift may also be explained by the greater integration of the global art world’s so-called margins and centre, and the curatorial appetite for transnationally sourced exhibitions shedding the cultural-historical frame provided by a show’s Indonesian or Asian identity—true of biennales devoid of national pavilions or geographic specialisation. In other words, a work from Indonesia no longer contextualised in an ‘Indonesia exhibition’ would need to adopt a ‘global’ language of art, understood as more contextually neutral, and reliant on generic aesthetics. Or would it? Looking to Jaarsma and other Southeast Asian artists’ pieces of the 1990s-2000s, one discovers works that focusing unambiguously on local concerns, achieved critical relevance for broader audiences unfamiliar with specific parochial tensions. Aesthetics, materialised by visually compelling forms, palette, and materials; locations ensuring community access and non-elite visibility; and viewer engagement fostered by familiar actions such as eating or flashlight waving, all combined through deft artistic handling, can communicate ideas that spawned in the local, make sense to diverse publics. Sectarian tensions, insider-outsider positions, others factionalisms, at the heart of public and private life in Indonesia, are in fact politically and philosophically important everywhere.
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PribumiPribumi and Dirty Hands grapple with polarity by imposing choice and action on viewers, who must act as a bridge. Pieces such as Hi Inlander Hallo Native, The Follower, and The Landscaper grapple with inside/outside locations through costume, or through visual and conceptual confrontation. Centred on discourses of mobility, these pieces, proposing metaphoric or physical “movement” from one position to another, reduce distance. PribumiPribumi, conceived when Reformasi was only hinted at, is prescient in its tackling of the give-and-takes of newly democratising Indonesia at a time of flux caused by political vacuum when Indonesians experienced the exhilarating, but also dangerous freedom to choose.
This essay has traced idiomatic constancy and evolution in Mella Jaarsma’s extensive oeuvre. Via varied thematic concerns, works probe religious and ethnic pluralism, rural/urban divides, cultural transfer and hybridity, identity politics, and the impacts of history, among others. Though Indonesian parameters are often their starting point, Jaarsma’s installations and performances translate transculturally, the interplay of their moving, refractory discourses opening to critical response in wide contemporary settings. Close-reading of pieces has shown that even as their content alters, often in relation to contextual change as Indonesia’s late-Suharto era gave way to the Reformasi period, and then the post-2010 years of liberal regression, they remain faithful to an expressive methodology that transcends time and place. This artistic language, putting polarity in play, drives audience engagement, as viewers must consider their positions and answers. Artwork deconstruction discloses how dynamic processes of fluid shuffling between confronted ideas and signs dare viewers to bridge divides; or lead them to imagine negotiation between positions, sometimes from inside to outside, or vice versa. This work isn’t activist in a political sense, yet can have activist effect.
Mella Jaarsma’s art was initially nurtured in 1980s and 1990s Yogyakarta at a time of social and artistic advocacy in the final years of Indonesia’s authoritarian New Order. Socially-slanted performance and public space artworks were practiced for their capacity to reach wide audiences and defy censorship. By the late-1990s, Jaarsma was developing a performative, viewer-mobilising installation form that was both idiosyncratic, and rooted in Indonesian contemporary art as first spawned by the 1970s pioneering avant-garde. As this essay has shown, Jaarsma’s expression, characterised by plural consciousness, has continued to underpin her visual language. While thematically this art has grappled with Reformasi’s central issues, sometimes presciently, its multiple outlooks develop methods present in avant-garde Indonesian art of the 1970s, and shared in the wider Southeast Asian contemporary art canon. Observation of Mella Jaarsma’s pieces over decades reveals a way of looking at the world that deliberately draws on shared context, her own within evolving, turn-of-the-millennium Indonesia, constant awareness of collective concerns, and a daring willingness to mobilise plural audiences into debate, her public engagement constant. Mella Jaarsma’s overarching enquiry begins in the self, but attuned to evolving social-cultural contexts, invites all viewers in.
Figures:
Fig 1
Jim Supangkat
Ken Dedes
1975
(voor Rolf, foto komt eraan
Fig 2
FX Harsono
‘Apa yang Anda lakukan jika pistol ini adalah pistol beneran / What would You Do if These Crackers were Real Guns?’
Rice crackers, note books, table, chair
1977
Courtesy of the artist
Fig 3
Mella Jaarsma
‘PribumiPribumi’
3 July 1998
Performance, Malioborostreet, Yogyakarta
Fig 4
Jakkai Siributr
‘The Changing Room’
2017
table, chair, clothes rack, clothing, installation dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist
Photography: credit Smit Na Nakornpanom
Fig 5
Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
‘Commonwealth: Project Another Country’
2013 – 2019
handcrafted using metal tin cans, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artists and Yavuz Gallery
Fig 6
FX Harsono
‘Burning Victims’
1998
Performance and installation
Courtesy of the artist and Cemeti, Yogyakarta
Fig 7
Mella Jaarsma
Hi Inlander Hallo Native
1998-1999
Frog’s legs, chicken feet, kangaroo leather, fish skin, photographs, 3 kitchen tables, spices
Fig 8
Mella Jaarsma
The Follower
2002
Embroidered emblems
Photography: Mie Cornoedus
Fig 9
Mella Jaarsma
Dirty Hands
2010
Stainless steel, chains, torches, lamp
Fig 10
Mella Jaarsma
The Landscaper
2013
video, 3:40 min.
Photography: Mie Cornoedus
Fig 11
Mella Jaarsma
DogWalk’
2015/2016
12 costumes of cow, sheep and goat leather, stuffed cow and goat feet
Two channel video, 3’ 10’’
Photography: Mie Cornoedus
[1] A commonality explored transregionally over decades, Iola Lenzi,“Lost and found: tracing pre-modern cultural heritages in Southeast Asian Contemporary art”, Connecting Art and Heritage, edited by Bui Thi Thanh Mai (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishing/Vietnam University of Fine Arts, 2013).
[2] A discourse explored historically and transnationally in the 2014-2015 exhibition The Roving Eye- contemporary art in Southeast Asia, at ARTER/Koc Foundation, Istanbul.
[3] See Anthony Reid, A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015) 65-95 and 130-133.
[4] Ibid Reid, 101-105; 133-134.
[5] Texts on this complex topic are too numerous to cite, with post-colonial transitions, the cold-war, in some cases civil wars, explosive and unmanaged urban growth, and many other factors complicating and differentiating modernisation in various Southeast Asian locales.
[6] Julie Ewington, “Mella Jaarsma the problem of location“, in Beyond the Future The Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1999), 62.
[7] As a 1988 co-founder Yogyakarta’s Cemeti Gallery (later Cemeti Art House), one of Indonesia’s pioneering independent spaces for experimental art, Jaarsma was at the heart of the Indonesian art scene, since Yogyakarta, along with Bali, was a central creative hub.
[8]Ewington, “The problem of location”, 62, for Ewington, Jaarsma’s biography is significant, but not determinant.
[9] On Indonesia’s 1998 communitarian violence see Sarah Turner and Pamela Allen, “Chinese Indonesians in a rapidly changing nation: Pressures of ethnicity and identity,”Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol. 48, No. 1 (April 2007); on the Indonesian government’s role in inciting anti-Chinese violence in 1998, Samsu Rizal Panggabean and Benjamin Smith, “Explaining Anti-Chinese Riots in Late 20th Century Indonesia”, World Development Vol. 39, No. 2 (2011).
[10]After its Yogya street presentation in 1998, it was shown overseas for the first time as video documentation in Reformasi- Contemporary Indonesian Artists Post-1998, Sculpture Square, Singapore, May-July, 2004—as the curator I collected audience responses to the exhibition. PribumiPribumi was shown again in Sunshower: Contemporary Art form Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, Mori Art Museum, Japan Foundation Asia Center, and the National Art Center, Tokyo, 2017;and at Dunia Dalam Berita, at Macan Museum, Jakarta, in 2019. The piece was referenced by Ewington in 1999, see note 6
[11] Dutch-born Jaarsma, implanted in Yogya cultural life since the 1980s, belongs to neither community. The sporadic persecution of Sino-Indonesians in the 20th century can be traced back to colonial history when the Dutch, to serve their commercial interests, conferred on ethnic Peranakan Chinese under their control a status differing from that of the rest of the local population. The results of this distinction were exacerbated by Cold War geopolitical polarisation and used for political gain by both the Sukarno and Suharto administrations. See Ong Hok Ham, “Chinese Capitalism in Dutch Java”, Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No.2 (Sept. 1989) 156-166 and 172-173.
[12] In the American context, see Sara Savat, “The divide between us: Urban-rural political differences rooted in geography”, The Source (18 Feb., 2020, Washington University in St Louis) online newsletter source.wustl.edu/2020/02/the-divide-between-us-urban-rural-political-differences-rooted-in-geography/; in the European context, Juan Roses and Nikolaus Wolf eds., The Economic Development of Europe’s Regions: A Quantitative History Since 1900 (Routledge Explorations in Economic History, 2018) on acute rural/urban disparities in developed countries.
[13]Dirty Hands was commissioned for the exhibition Making History-how Southeast Asian art re-conquers the past to conjure the future, Jendela Space, Esplanade Theatres on the Bay, Singapore, 2010.
[14]The Roving Eye- contemporary art in Southeast Asia, ARTER/Koc Foundation, Istanbul, 2014-2015.
[15]Mella Jaarsma, on Whatsapp video with the author, 5 July, 2020.
[16] Even as numbers of biennales increased after 2010, Asian artists seem to have been selected from a relatively limited pool.
[17] Ibid.
[18] See Jeremy Menchik, “Moderate Muslims and Democratic Breakdown in Indonesia”, Asian Studies Review, vol. 43, 2019, issue 3 (special edition on civil Islam revisited) on post-2010 moderate Islam’s move away from civic pluralism and pluralistic approaches to Islam and religion more generally. Also Tim Lindsay, “20 Years after Soeharto: is Indonesia’s ‘Era Reformasi’ Over?” https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/20-years-after-soeharto-is-indonesia-s-era-reformasi-over accessed 12.5.2020 Lindsay suggests regression even before 2010.