Source: www.nadigallery.com
See also: Eddie Hara's Profile and Works on Javafred

Stories and Images from the Realm of Subculture

Eddie Hara's solo exhibition: Global warming, Cool Art !
5 Dec. - 18 Dec. 2007, Nadi Gallery

Enin Supriyanto, Curator

The end of the 1980s must be taken note as important years for the development of Indonesian contemporary art, in Jogjakarta particularly. On the 31st of January 1988, a small space of a rented house on Ngadisuryan, Jogjakarta, was officially opened as an exhibition hall. Cemeti Gallery (later became Cemeti Art House in 1999) was the name of the place. That day, an art exhibition showing the works of five artists (Heri Dono, Mella Jaarsma, Nindityo Adipurnomo, Harry Wahyu “Ong”, and EddiE haRA) was opened there. The end of the 1980s is important not because of some big event involving fiery debates like those marking the “New Art Movement” in the 1970s, but for the sporadic phenomena of art experiments in various cities (Jogjakarta, Bandung, Jakarta), which connected artists in a network that in a glance might look loose and fluid yet was in fact spirited by a common and comparable drive for change. They didn’t conceive change and work for it in terms of some collective, massive movement with strong ideological bond. Instead, they introduce it by means of disseminating similar or common values and ideas with each artist pursuing his/her own way in relation with his/her work, life style and attitude. They worked and explored various esthetic idioms, approaches, concepts, media, methods, and techniques—trying to break free from the lethargy and stagnancy of the established art of that time in art academies as well as market. In its most actual practice, Indonesian contemporary art was born in such sub-cultural environment.

And outside Jogja, even outside Indonesia, a number of young people kept “changing the world” from the periphery, from sub-cultural zones. Greenpeace, by combining various creative communication means and street activism, actively promoted environmental preservation. They launched campaigns against the extinction of the whale, the destruction of tropical forests, and the danger of nuclear waste. The explosion at the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Russia, on 26 April 1986, with all the environmental damage and casualties involved, stunned the world. The accident seems to justify the serious attention given since then until today to the voices from the periphery that Greenpeace has raised. Prior to it, in a neighboring country, the Philippines, in February 1986, a democratization process almost unimaginable to take place in the third world had indeed happened in the hands of the masses, the common people. ‘People’s Power Revolution’had succeeded in dethroning President Ferdinand Marcos and brought Corazon Aquino, a woman, a housewife, to the presidency. And, in entering the 21st century, we witness the continuation of the phenomenon: Megawati in Indonesia, Benazir Butho in Pakistan, and through Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina quite recently. In Asia, behind the “Iron Curtain” Chinese students and youths voiced their aspiration of freedom—though ending tragically—at Tiananmen square, Beijing, May 1989. Meanwhile, the wave of change launched by Mikhail Gorbachev from the Soviet Union was swiftly changing the life and geopolitical feature of Europe. The Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin, robustly standing to mark the stagnancy of the Cold War since 1961, began to be opened and eventually broken down in early November 1989. Its remnants remind people how the dark age for humanity—brought up by the arrogance of power—was amendable.

Such significant events did not begin entirely with something spectacular and thunderous. Optimism about change characterized the era, and on the individual level people regained their conviction that change was feasible even though it began with tiny voices amid a small group in society. Annita Roddick opened a shop selling items for body care and perfumes, The Body Shop, while voicing the importance of environmental preservation, respect for the human, and even animal, rights. Years later, the network of shops and forms of activism that she had introduced instilled the same concern in many people. Currently, we see an increasing number of individuals from the sub-cultural realm, which in their own ways aspire to do things so as to make our human world better and more human. We have Bono, Jeffrey Sachs, Al Gore, Muhammad Yunus, and who knows who else working quietly, beyond mass-media coverage.

EddiE haRA—and some friends in Jogja— represents a generation of artists that begin their career in a period that lends such atmosphere described above, an atmosphere that enables people to learn to believe that voicing out their thoughts honestly while keeping themselves open to various changes is a legitimate way to fill their lives best without having to succumb to established, let alone out-dated, public opinions. This sort of attitude is often taken lightly as “youth’s restiveness and misbehavior” or deviation. Not many people realize or admit that such voices full of jokes or curses from the periphery, the realm of subculture, speak out thoughts that enable us to alertly re-examine a wide range of consensuses, norms, regulations, and laws hitherto already taken for granted. We know that in many cases activities and values coming from the subculture realm have been contributing to the shaping of our civilization. The world no longer lies in the hands of conventional political actors; now it also depends on free agents from the “sub-political” zone. And probably, it is just from the sub-cultural and sub-political areas that solutions will come for the many problems the world is facing today: environmental destruction, energy crisis, war, pandemic threats—“global warming” in the broadest meaning of the word. Such marginal voices, if we borrow the oxymoron pattern often featuring in EddiE haRA’s works, can be called: the loud minority.

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I think the brief description of the world of Indonesian art in the end of the 1980s, along with the world events in that particular period, as well as the sub-cultural spirit going along with them, is important in our attempt to comprehend EddiE haRA’s journey of creativity and to get a perspective in perceiving his works as well as the artist’s position in Indonesian contemporary art.

EddiE haRA is just one among Indonesian contemporary artists (besides Agus Suwage and Heri Dono, for instance) that keep on moving to follow “the problems of human beings and the world” in their own individual ways. Those problems include issues in the “history” of contemporary art. To be involved in discussions with EddiE haRA, or Agus Suwage, on the works and concepts of contemporary artists from Europe, USA, Latin America, India, and others, covering painting, photography, performance, installation, and various kinds of experimental works, also on rock music from the 1969 Woodstock generation through metal and punk of the 1980s, can be exciting. And of course they are attentive to the problems faced by the world today: war, terrorism, energy and environment, sexuality, gender, violence and criminality in urban setting.

Such actual problems are almost always present in the works by EddiE haRA, whether they stand as the main subjects or else additional subjects in works that focus on personal issues. In EddiE haRA’s works, all of them are present in characteristic visual configurations, which lend the atmosphere of some cohesive sub-cultural spirit. It’s been a long time since he began to borrow and work visual idioms from subcultures that he adopts as reference in his attempt to enrich the visual vocabulary of his work. Attitudes, viewpoints, as well as various artistic patterns from the sub-cultural realm find coherence in EddiE haRA’s works because all of them are not just artificial additions but, instead, the reflections of EddiE’s personality as an artist, a father, a husband, and a human being in his daily life.

For illustration, during his student years, as the artist himself admitted, he decided to make himself appear like a punk. “The first punk in ASRI”, he said. He cut clean one half of his head while letting the other half have long hair. He wore a big earring on his left ear. His three-quarter loose pants make him look like a skater. These attributes of his daily appearance have remained until today. The membranes of his ears still survive the heavy metal noise with its so many variants that have kept increasing since his student years in the 1980s. In his own way, he maintains his concern for various issues regarding “the safety of humankind and the world”. For instance, he and his family, now living in Basel, Switzerland, decide to have local, not imported products, for their daily consumption. They also persistently consume organic-goods, with no pesticides in the farming process, nor genetically engineered.

The attitudes of ‘sub-cultural’ persons differ from those who are counterculture proponents. The last mentioned always assume there are some ‘official’ enemies centering around the mainstreams of culture and society, and counterculture proponents want to systematically fight against or overthrow such establishment. Activism and radicalism almost always inhere in counterculture groups. As for persons that live and grow in sub-cultures, while adhering to different views and living out alternative attitudes and values, do not necessarily regard radical activism as a necessity. Subculture spirit often prevails in the personal space, loosely interconnected within an open community. However, there is sincerity and seriousness in their attitude even if they often wrap it with appearances, language styles, modes of dressing, and musical preferences that might suggest carelessness and playfulness—a paradoxical illustration of an “unseriously serious”lifestyle.

Such remarks also hold true for works by EddiE haRA that often appear cheerful, rich with colors, featuring fanciful figures of peculiar, funny or absurd appearances, yet often contain serious messages. And that has been part of the nature of the artist’s works for quite some time. Since the 1990s, there has been a significant number of EddiE’s that explicitly deal with environmental issues. Among them is “Adam and Eve and the Acid Rain” now belonging to the Singapore Art Museum collection. Long before it, and I am speaking of his first work to arrest me, at the Ninth Jakarta Art Biennale (1993-1994) EddiE had showed his “Alice in Wonderland”—a picture that at first glance looks funny but actually features a serious concern that is AIDS.

Having subculture spirit to live his daily life, it is not surprising that EddiE haRA easily applies the same approach to art. He never confines himself to painting just on canvas. Once he claimed that painting is to him a self-therapy. The act of painting, drawing, channeling out imaginations and gnawing thoughts, is more important than thinking about the limitation of the media adopted. He retains his enthusiasm for wall painting. He keeps working on his “Postcards from the Alps”series: the drawings he makes on tens of used envelopes of the various letters he has received at his Basel home. He pastes collages on those envelopes and then let his imagination ramble on those used envelopes, adding words or phrases along with several characters that are typically EddiE haRA’s.

Let us for now ignore several names and art styles—CoBrA, Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut, outsider art—with which EddiE haRA’s works have hitherto been associated. EddiE has the quality of children’s wild imagination that is spontaneous, a mind game capable of canceling adults’ cognitive rationality that can only formulate causal routes. In this context, it is not unjustified for us to observe that there is some surrealistic quality in his works. Andre Breton, one of the prominent thinkers of Surrealism in the beginning of the twentieth century, in fact emphasized the high effectiveness of imagination and childhood memories. And for him Surrealism is also the celebration of the capacity for imagination and childhood thinking. In his “First Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), he states: “The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best part of its childhood. […] childhood where everything nevertheless conspire to bring about the effective, risk-free possession of oneself. Thanks to Surrealism, it seems that opportunity knocks a second time.” (Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (ed): Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell Publishing, 1995, p. 438).

EddiE haRA admits that he has come to the qualities of spontaneity and wildness equivalent with what is hitherto called Art Brut, or outsider art, in the pictorial language of children that make pictures as part of their playing. He, as illustration, often reciprocally “learns how to draw” with his son Mimmo. (Arif Bagus Prasetyo, The World of Children & Critical Idiosyncrasy, in the exhibition catalog “Blues for Mimmo Part II”, Danes Art Veranda, 2004). In effect, with spontaneity that ignores all risks, EddieE’s pictorial language looks like a mixture of various elements: robot or superhero dolls all of which are kitsch, different characters that only appear in children’s dreams or naïve imaginations, forms of living beings that exist in the ambiguity between the comical and the ghastly, such as octopuses or squids, jellyfish, a visual style that relies on the strength of line like found in printed comics; the composition of colors, forms, overlapping text like street graffiti, modified animation cartoon heroes, coupled with bright colors that are clashing and juxtaposing like street neon signs, or the quality of glimmering lights on television and computer screens, etcetera.

Some say that these various visual idioms represent today’s visual trend that stand as the manifestation of our contemporary visual world besieged by the production and distribution of all kinds of extensive icons and appearances or even moving beyond animation and comic books: the “Animamix” visual world (Victoria Lu, “The Originals: Neo-Aesthetics of Animamix”, in C-Arts, the initial number, November 2007). As we see, the presence of such visual trend of this kind of art is increasingly obvious around us. We have super-flatpaintings of Murakami’s fashion, Yoshitomo Nara’s figures and sentimentality of children and adolescents, and the all-flat style of comics and murals filled up with phrases with no clear meaning or oxymoronic sentences of spun and upside-down logic (as now also found in Eko Nugroho’s works) as well as in the paintings and video works by some artists of the latest generation in China. In the context of such development of this sort of art, which now seems developing as a new genre in the world’s noisy contemporary art, we can appropriately say that EddiE HaRA has been recording and presenting such visual trends since almost twenty years ago. To be more specific, EddiE haRA is a distinct genre in the current of Indonesian contemporary art developments.

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Here in his exhibition “Global Warming, Cool Art!”, EddiE keeps going on with the voices from the subculture realm: dealing with the environment, the conduct of art practitioners, and various other issues crisscrossing in his head, and unfolding around us.

He remains consistent with his choice of the subculture track in his artistic pursuit: making painting on a portion of the gallery wall, offering collages on the media of used envelopes in addition to some works on canvas. For the last mentioned, particularly his works made in 2007, EddiE haRA adopts a visualization style that emphasizes the varying characters of figures and written phrases scattering around them. While his previous works are strongly characterized by lively colors, the latest works tend to be monochromatic.

In some of the latest works, EddiE obviously gives emphasis to the characters of his figures by relying on black or dark outlines. Meanwhile, the backgrounds that were previously often filled with different colors applied layer after layer on fields already washed with dark colors, are now only filled with paint layers of whitey nuances in heaps and arrangements that suggest textures resembling the surfaces of old building walls. That way, some of his latest paintings really look like wild graffiti from city corners cut randomly and moved onto his canvas, and brought into a gallery. In addition, various written words that form silly sentences, curses, or else nonsensical phrases that remind of secret codes are incorporated along with icons from the subculture world—skull, crossing bones, or hands—and those unique finger positions and their very specific meanings.

Some works of his past period are also included in this exhibition, and they become important for one who wants to EddiE haRA’s evolution of creativity—something that is often questioned by art observers and lovers in the country.

All these help to show clearly that the spirit of subculture remains actively alive in EddiE haRA the person and his works.

Long live, you, fat ass artist!

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