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Krisna Murti's profile
KRISNA MURTI’s
FORBIDDEN ZONE
Lola Lenzi
November 2007
Though undeniably central to Indonesia’s complex social fabric, the expression
of ethnic and religious pluralism was effectively suppressed in the name of
national cohesion during the 31-year Soeharto regime. However, with the fall of
the dictator in 1998, and the subsequent budding of democracy and easing of
rigid political taboos, the polarisation resulting from this pluralism has
re-emerged as a tangible and potent force shaping Indonesian society today. And
though the fracture that has accompanied a loosening of state control has
sometimes triggered divisive and indeed violent actions, the overall situation
of flux now dominating the national landscape also lends itself to the opening
of an important field of investigation for Indonesia’s artists and writers.
Thoughtful cultural players, many of whom are visual artists, are increasingly
constructing a dialogue about difference and evolving perspective that, in the
context of slowly changing Indonesia, is providing seeds of renewal and
progress.
An Indonesian practitioner who has been examining the archipelago’s cultural
hybridity both from inside the nation’s cultural boundaries, as well as from an
outsider’s vantage point, is Krisna Murti. Of mixed Javanese and Balinese
heritage, Murti emblematically embodies the conflicts and divides at the heart
of contemporary Indonesian identity. More importantly however, the Jakarta-based
installation and video artist also embodies the uniquely sophisticated, rich,
multi-dimensional and predominantly comfortable meshing of the distinct strands
at the foundation of Indonesia’s cosmopolitan and tolerant civilization.
Despite straddling Muslim and Hindu cultures, Krisna Murti only began tackling
his own split identity artistically in the years since sectarian tensions have
flared in the wake of post-Soeharto re-building. Beyond his interest in this
specifically Indonesian and purely parochial dichotomy, Murti also looks beyond
his nation’s borders and as an insider with outsider knowledge, scrutinises and
contrasts the surface signs and deeper meaning of local narratives. An
internationally-traveled artist, he applies his extensive knowledge of Western
cultural perceptions to widen his multi-prismic view of his homeland,
incorporating both native and foreign-tinged experiences. Thus the effects of
post-colonial reality, relevant to regional intellectual discourse in the years
following the European’s departure from the archipelago and wider South East
Asia, but milked dry in much banal and conceptually weak artistic practice of
more recent times, are given a more subtle and nuanced reading by Murti’s
probing but never sanctimonious offerings.
Characterised by its multiplicity of perspective and understatement, Murti’s
practice of the last several years focuses on variable questions relating to
specifically local concerns as well as how these change with outsider
perception: the visible and invisible codes and conventions of Islam, the
ongoing exoticisation of Bali and her customs -a fixture of Balinese life for
the islanders as well as for those outside for nearly a century-, Indonesia’s
relationship with foreigners, new forms of cultural colonisation, the place
Indonesia gives itself in the world…
While some works such as his 2003 four minute loop single projection video Beach
Time dissect the conceptual paradox of a given code’s widely differing
interpretation according to cultural, religious and gender positioning, others,
such as the metaphoric Video Spa of 2004/5 juxtapose indigenous and foreign
readings of appropriated and vulgarised local spiritual and cultural practices.
Yet other pieces, including those with an activist bent that take art into the
realm of politics, seek to engage with ongoing socio-political problems linked
to internal conflicts between different local or external interest groups.
The 2007 digital print work The Glare is such a work. Comprising images of
Balinese rice terraces, their utopian perfection disturbed by the aggressive
reflection of a mirror positioned to capture the powerful rays of the tropical
sun, without slogans or aesthetic hard edges The Glare conjures violence and
discord. The confrontation at the heart of the series opposes Bali’s rice
farmers whose entire way of life and source of livelihood centre around the rice
crop and harvest, with intrusive ‘others’ -tourists, be they Western or Asian-
who are only concerned with ‘capturing’ the beauty of the idyllic Balinese
landscape on film while contributing nothing to either the land or those who
labour it. The peasants install mirrors in their fields to spoil the tourists’
photographs in an act of silent protest. But beyond this act of defiance, the
artist refines the conceptual power of the series, underscoring both the potency
of non-violent protest as well as the ultimate empowerment of the Balinese
farmers. Though effectively documenting a specifically Indonesian issue, the
work can be read in the broader South East Asian context where the rural/urban
divide(1) and the metaphoric distance of new-urbanites from the land they have
abandoned have been a pan-regional source of friction since the early stages of
modernisation dating to the post-war period.
Yet another installation, No Hero of 2006 evokes the ambiguous status of
Indonesian women working as domestic helpers in foreign countries such as Taiwan
and Singapore. Though the theme has been explored before, Murti’s filmed
interviews of the women dwell less on their physical hardship than their duality
of existence, their feeling part of an alien family, yet pining for home. Again,
Murti’s concern, beyond the obvious critique of a country that though relatively
rich in resources, is run such that its own women must leave home and family to
find employment, centres on the women’s double vantage point of insiders and
outsiders, both relative to Indonesia, as well as to their new family
environment. Relevant to the region as a whole, where migrant workers are a
commonplace, the video piece broadens out from its original social core to
become a universally engaging and thoughtful piece about identity and
perspective.
Thus whatever Murti’s choice of media, theme and form, his works of recent years
all share a sharply-focused presentation of multi-prismic viewpoints, an
interrogation of received and conventional meaning, and a keen awareness of the
power of sensory evocation in the articulation of complex and possibly divisive
issues. And though sometimes steering close to documentation -No Hero and The
Glare are two works that use documentary investigation as visual starting
points-, his montages always expand conceptually to become art.
Forbidden Zone, made this year, moves well beyond the documentary and may well
be Murti’s most conceptually mixed and topically wide-ranging multi-media
installation to date. Including video, photography and acrylic on canvas,
Forbidden Zone incorporates a commentary about the on/off status of Indonesia as
a no-go zone for international travelers due to the perceived threat of
terrorism, with the examination of cultural criticism instituted by one of
Indonesia’s pioneer modernist painters in the post-colonial period.
Whereas a work such as Beach Time is characterised by its visual as well as
conceptual simplicity, expressing a single but potently delivered idea, the
meaning of Forbidden Zone only sinks in gradually as the viewer absorbs the
piece. And while the work is not enigmatic, a certain amount of background
knowledge is necessary for a full comprehension of the installation’s layered
commentary and references.
Starting with his choice of media, before even getting into the installation’s
subject, Krisna Murti sets his piece up to interrogate received notions
associated with the hierarchical relationship between photography, paint on
canvas and video. Meshing the three habitually autonomous forms into a single
work, he establishes a discomfort that is responsible for a low-voltage tension
that disturbs the viewer as he begins to decode Forbidden Zone’s deeper
iconographic significance. But far from divorced from the work’s conceptual aim,
Murti’s deliberate challenge to conventional associations -the cliché of
painting as traditional medium, video as contemporary, and photography situated
somewhere in-between the first and the second-, leads his audience into the
piece’s multi-tiered vision.
Initially Forbidden Zone’s coded signs seem disjointed: still images of
perfectly formed emerald-green terraced rice paddies, a video of an aircraft flying at various times of day over tropical landscape, and
realistically painted landscapes of Bali and Java. Soon however Murti’s
mixed-media collage comes into focus as a whole, its various components speaking
in different registers to the viewer pondering Indonesia’s complex modern
identity as a nation.
The work is in fact a four-dimensional (time the fourth dimension) critical
allegory of Indonesian reality, incorporating insider and outsider perspectives
today, as well as over time.
Analysing Forbidden Zone chronologically, or starting at the allegory’s
beginning, the viewer takes in the paintings, naturalistically rendered in
acrylic and depicting the indigenous, unpopulated landscape. Though the canvases
are not anachronistic -i.e., modern life is in peripheral evidence here in the
form of power-lines, high-rise buildings, roads, airplane landing strips, buses
and boats-, they nonetheless mainly evoke the sublime beauty of the Indonesian
landscape so dear to 19th and 20th century Dutch painters bowled over by the
idyllic splendour of their colony’s physical attributes. Desert islands,
sunsets, exquisite pastel skyscapes, mist-shrouded volcanoes, all idealized
visions of the exotic tropical land are portrayed as perceived and desired by
the colonial outsiders who then made it their own. Searching further, the viewer
will note that the landscapes, even those showing contemporary life, are devoid
of people, or more particularly of Indonesians. Here Murti can be seen to be
tersely re-stating the standard discourse of the post-colonial period holding
that the colonists were interested in the land and her wealth rather than her
indigenous inhabitants. But beyond this simplistic reading, and aware of the
artist’s willingness to ponder situations from multiple viewpoints, the viewer
is prompted instead to think more deeply about the idealism associated with all
natural, non-concrete-dominated landscapes in today’s rapidly modernizing, and
urbanizing Asian societies. Finally, digging yet deeper into local cultural
history, -and here, some knowledge of Indonesian aesthetic history is
pertinent-, the paintings reference a debate sparked by pioneer modernist
Javanese painter Sudjojono(2) who, as anti-Dutch sentiment rose in the
1930’s(3), and as a spokesman for the Persagi movement (4), reacted to the
traditional European aesthetic canon by criticising local painters reproducing
what the senior artist perceived to be mooi Indie(5), or ‘the exoticised, and
idealistically beautiful Indonesian landscapes of the colonisers’. This part of
the installation therefore poses sensitive and, in this day of incessant
post-modern appropriation, highly relevant questions about the ownership of
aesthetic interpretation and ideas, and the altered meaning of borrowed
stylistic genres.
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As a counterpoint to these reference-packed canvases, Krisna Murti’s composition
includes a still photographic image of lush Balinese rice terraces. These are so
perfect and symmetrical that he assimilates the pristine view with man-made
architecture, calling the vista Colosseum. Again, an awareness of the
contradiction between perception and reality depending on context dictates his
choice of frame and name as the conventionally beautiful but real landscapes of
his paintings -this real-life perfection so disliked and viewed as a ‘forbidden
zone’ by former generations of artists- collide with the natural but seemingly
artificial paddy-fields. This collision, however allusive its staging, prompts
the viewer to consider whether there can ever be only a single rightful owner of
an image and its interpretation.
A third component of the installation, the video airplane, links the first two
forbidden zones, the canvases depicting the faithfully reproduced but seemingly
exoticised version of the indigenous landscape, and today’s Indonesia as
perceived by the outside world, a no-go or forbidden zone due to recent
international terrorism-inspired travel bans. Beyond their role as a transition,
the video images of an aircraft taking off, flying and landing over the
tropical landscape contrast the encroaching visitor/tourist with the unsullied
and perfect natural environment of the South East Asian paradise. The iconography,
generic in terms of locale, again suggest the traffic between geographic points that
leads to different perceptions and experiences of a same time and place according
to the viewer's cultural identity.
How should the real Indonesia be perceived, as a forbidden or most desirable zone?
And where does the artist stand in relation to his country: outsider looking in or rather,
insider staring out? Again, Murti positions himself simultaneously on both sides of
the divide such that his work operates both as a critique of internal dependence as
well as of external paranoia.
Though easily deconstructed, Forbidden Zone as a whole is greater than its
parts, functioning as an integrated piece because it speaks intimately of
Indonesia on several different but related levels. Evoking the archipelago’s
complex and much fought-over cultural history, the installation recalls both
that history’s colonial distortions, as well as those perpetrated by the
Indonesian intelligentsia as a reaction to the colonists’ perceptions. Through
the suggestion of these discourses from the archipelago’s past, the artist
provokes the viewer to question assumptions concerning the validity and truth of
the construct of Indonesia, present and future. Meaning, like beauty, is in the
eye of the beholder and the thoughtful, multi-tiered art of Krisna Murti
ultimately empowers the viewer to ponder and decide for himself.
(Published in exhibition catalogue)
NOTES
(1) Mashadi, Ahmed, ‘Some Aspects of Nationalism and Internationalism in
Philippine Art’, Modernity and Beyond: Themes in Southeast Asian Art, ed. T.K.
Sabapathy, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore 1996, p. 52 for comments concerning
the gulf separating urban and rural populations in the wider Southeast Asian
context. Cf. also Iola Lenzi, ‘Formal Cues and Historical Clues in the art of
Sutee Kunavichayanont’, Inflated Nostalgia, Atelier Frank & Lee, Singapore 2001,
pp. 8-9, for a discussion of Thai city-dwellers’ romanticized perception of the
country-side as a rural idyll and a preserve of ‘authenticity’.
(2) Sudjojono, Sindudarsono (1914-1985) is considered one of the forefathers of
indigenous Indonesian modernism. His non-idealised iconography includes village
scenes, rural poverty and old people.
(3) Indonesia garnered its independence from the Netherlands in 1949 after
several years of war.
(4) Persagi, from Persatuan Ahli-ahli Gambar Indonesia, was the Union of
Indonesian Painters established by Sudjojono and others in 1937. Sudjojono was
the group’s spokesman.
(5) Members of Persagi, and particularly Sudjojono, as part of their ongoing
mission to develop Indonesian modernism, encouraged local painters to abandon
the romantic and colonial Mooi Indie (Beautiful Indies) style in favour of a
truer approach to Indonesia’s landscape and people.
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